Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.

If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.